Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Galaxy Quest!

Theme: Phasers on Kill - Screeching Weasel

These are the trips of the space vessel Project. Its half-decade task: to look for novel fauna and uncontacted societies; to confidently venture where noone has yet essayed.

Since we can all agree Star Trek the Motion Picture was barely a Star Trek movie, the best Star Trek movie is of course 2000's Galaxy Quest, which also isn't a Star Trek movie (no, there aren't really any good Star Trek movies). Tim Allen, Alan Rickman and Sigourney Allan Weaver head up the cast of has-been actors from the fictitious TV show Galaxy Quest, which we are told aired in the 1980s but in 1999 or so remains popular enough to sustain a convention circuit just like Trek, where the most unwashed of autismos go to soyface over their devoted fandom, in the presence of the burned-out, jaded cast.

Me meeting any of my many fans (not you, though. You're my favourite).

But their world is TURNED UPSIDE DOWN when one particular group of awkward NERDS turn out to be IRL ayylmaos in real life in the movie (not in the show in the movie) and have an actual ship built after the specifications from the TV show, which they believe constitutes actual historical documents of real events. You might think little details like the credits would serve to disabuse them of this notion, but go away, it's a fun premise. It doesn't actually matter that movies make sense, only that they make enough sense for the type of movie that they are. If you get hung up on the details here, you might as well put Road Runner cartoons on blast because you can't really walk off a cliff onto thin air until you look down.

I like the one that makes SOME sense.

Anyway, once in spehss, our not-actually-heroes soon run into trouble with Stan Winston Workshop's finest creation since the Predator, stock villain Sarris:

All I want in life is to be a stock villain with an evil claw hand.

Sarris wants to kill the NERDS for some reason, who cares. WILL the TV stars bluff their way to victory? WILL Alan Rickman's ayy prosthetics last the entire runtime? WILL Sigourney Weaver's costume? FIND OUT, but it's no.

There's no blooper reel on the DVD I got from the charity shop, indicating against all odds that their deadpans held out longer than either.

The movie is FUNNY, parodies entertainment clichés out of love, not faux-superiority, and still plays more like a real movie than today's tentpole blockbusters, because the requisite emotional beats were still there and the filmmakers had the confidence not to undercut them with bathetic interruptions like Jar Jar Abrams and similar Josh Sweden imitating HACKS. Take, for instance, the scene where the captured has-beens must finally reveal to the ayys who they really are:

In honour of this forgotten level of taste and restraint, I won't even spoil the moment by pasting that fat guy that cries at trailers' face over the ayy.

I'm a little bit surprised Galaxy Quest isn't more widely known and referenced by YouTube critics, for were I, say, Disparu, I'd use this clip reliably in every other video:

Me watching anything at all.

But those are just my thoughts, what are yours? Like and subscribe to Khoomei Masterclass on YouTube Dot Com, stay hydrated, look both ways before crossing the street, put your left foot in, your left foot out, do the Bartman, never give up, never surrender, and I'll see you next time, and as always, don't eat yellow snow.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Dude, Where's My Car?

Theme: Ashtray - Screeching Weasel

C'est magnifique.

It's obvious the makers of 2000's perfect time capsule Dude, Where's My Car? set out to make the dumbest movie of all time not just of the week, but of all time. The fact that almost any given movie released after, say, 2012 surpasses it in crayon chewage should scarcely be allowed to detract from their then-seemingly-epochal achievement. Ashton Kutcher (TV's Punk'd!) and Seann William Scott (The Dukes of Hazzard) star as Jesse and Chester (or vice versa), two stoner layabouts one solitary IQ point above the maximum threshold for mandatory helmet allocation or admittance to a Zack Snyder flick.

"MmmDUHHHRrr" - these dudes.

Waking one day after a blurry and forgotten night of excitement, intrigue and illicit substances, our MENSA benchwarmers find that, let's say, Jesse's car is missing, prompting him to utter the titular phrase, to which, let's say, Chester replies "where's your car, dude?" This exchange goes on for a few minutes, and it ain't the last.

Pictures you can hear, exhibit A.

The rest of the movie ostensibly concerns itself with our intrepid breakfast eaters trying to unravel the mystery of what wild and whacky goings-on transpired during their unremembered night of rampage, but nothing like a coherent timeline with causal linkages between beats ever materialises, no doubt to your immeasurable consternation. At some point, we and they learn, they got tattoos, stumbled across a sci-fi quest for the mysterious continuum transfunctioner, and let's say Jesse got it on with Kristy Swanson's character, cleverly named Kristy Boner, which the especially observant viewer may notice is a colloquial term for an hardon.

She doesn't wear this all movie, which I feel was an oversight.

This leads to a series of run-ins with our Swan Swan's bf, who is an hilariously one-dimensional bully with the memorable catchphrase "stoner bashin' time", whom Kristy cannot stand but is dating for some reason. The reason is that she can leave him at the end of the movie. This sort of writing by reverse-engineering is so characteristic of Hollywood slop that it works wonderfully as parody, and so the writers cannot help but undermine their aspiration to be dumb, because the whole film works that way: as a satire of actual movie conventions it's more over the target than Scream, Airplane! or the like. The continuum transfunctioner is a parody of the Hitchcockian MacGuffin, Kristy Boner is a parody of on-the-nose symbolic naming in pretentious scripts, her OTT bad jock boyfriend a parody of The Karate Kid, and Jesse and Chester themselves a parody of stoner buddy duos like Bill and Ted, Jay and Silent Bob, and Merry and Pippin.

I can't believe that hack Jackson omitted their SoCal accents and van with Frank Frazetta's Silver Warrior painted on the side. Respect the source material, fatass!

But we need not even bother to appreciate Dude for this inadvertent (or, perhaps, semi-advertent) hidden depth; for Dude reveals the secret wisdom that dumb humour will always make us actually laugh more than smart humour. Time and again in life I've cracked myself up to the point of tears looking at random people and imagining just going up to them and going "MnnNHUURRRRr".

The retard was me all along.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: After the Sunset!

Theme: Fiesta - Ween

Spoylarz!!1

No, Pierce! She's fine the way she is.

In the storied annals of movies I picked up on DVD for £1 at charity shops, one of them was After the Sunset, starring the Architect (Tomorrow Never Dies) as master jewel thief Whocares Youwon'trememberhisnameanyway, who, after an especially audacious diamond heist from his hapless pursuer Woody Harrelson (Skyler from Breaking Bad), retires to the Bahamas where he quickly bores of living in wealth and luxury and banging prime Salma Hayek. #Relatable!

I'm not a machine, Salma.

But trouble is never far behind him, in the form of Harrelson, nor far in front, in that of the third diamond in the set he's been collecting, nor too far to his side, in the form of Don Cheadle, who plays a rarity in Hollywood slop: a villain who talks like they do in real life.

This is an hilarious way to frame pushing drugs to the community as noble.

I'm tired Salm Salm, I have a headache. Go write more economics papers.

CAN the Architect resist the lure of the third diamond? WILL Harrelson's Wile E. Coyote fed redeem his record of fuckups? OR will the two find themselves odd kindred spirits after the pattern of Heat and the Dhoom flicks? NO, no and sort-of, although in those movies the formula was that the cop and crook were somewhat evenly-matched, whereas here the Architect's deadpan cool-guy beats Harrelson's scenery-devouring sad-sack in scene after scene. BUT aren't our real enemies the friends we met along the way, or something?

Me and my buddy @RapeWaffen1776 in the gc (sorry if this handle belongs to a real one).

WOULD this flick be stronger if they let Harrelson's character be half a match for the Architect? Sure, it's just a different picture - maybe one with some suspense and stakes. But this is just a wish fulfilment fantasy, which is exactly what you want from any movie that isn't an actual artistic masterpiece, of which there are like five. The point of movies is so you can live on an exotic island for 90 minutes after working eight and a half hours plus commute in the rain with neurotypicals shrieking gibberish at you all day. If you'd rather watch depressing wank about Issues of an evening, you just don't have enough real problems.

No means no Salma!

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Wrestler!

Theme: The Crusher - Dee Dee King

RIP Hulk Hogan. While it's true my interest in professional wrestling extends about as far as Miss Hancock's legs, that's pretty far (41.5", or an entire Warwick Davies). But I laud the Hulkster for an unrelated reason: he one-shotted evil gossip rag Gawker in court after they illegally posted his sex tape and refused to take it down. If I were Pope, I'd offer absolution of sins for anyone who puts a j**rnalist out of w*rk, but I'm not sure Hogan ever did anything wrong to begin with (no, saying a popular hip hop word while of the wrong caste isn't doing anything wrong; grow up). Since I know nothing about wrestling, let's celebrate his legacy with this 2008 kino instead.

This movie taught me not to do coke with a mid or you'll wake up in her firemen-themed shrine.

Mickey Rourke (Rumble Fish) stars as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, whose 80s heyday was as far behind him at the time of this movie as this movie is behind us now, but feels more ancient if not mythical, because not even I was alive for most of it. Still, Randy never traded in his ancient console for something as newfangled as a PS1 or Dream Cast, nor his Ratt and Cinderella records for Nevermind.

Uhhh based?

Sadly, Randy's career went off the rails and he's now stuck in a shit job with a snarky hairlet boss and working what looks like a dwindling indie circuit with much younger talent on the weekends, between drowning his sorrows at a strip club, showing off his pixelated likeness in an ancient vidya to half-bored kids, and trying awkwardly to reconcile with his amazingly obnoxious estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood, as herself).

Evan, honey, I'm not the one who failed to convince the world that Marilyn Manson was a creepy pervert.

But could Randy make a comeback with a twenty-year-anniversary rematch against his most famous heel, The Ayatollah (Ernest Miller)? While they almost certainly just made the heel The Ayatollah as a pointed stab at the low-status jingoism of the downscale plebs who watch wrestling, it actually works on a few levels: just like the news, the audience are marks, the shoot is a work, and the real enemy isn't Iran, but your own regime of which the entertainment industry is a consensus-fabricating appendage. You can even get into a more esoteric neo-Platonic reading of the kayfabe as the cave, but all that would go over Randy's head. As the ties that bind him to the outside world fray and snap under the pressure, he's both lost and set free. For him, it's the ""real"" world that's fake and gay, and he's not altogether wrong.

Scenes wahmen will never understand, thy name is this one from The Wrestler.

The ubiquitous Bush-era shakycam may have aged like ass (inb4 >implying it was ever good), but it fits better here than in a lot of other movies from the 2000s, and there's a running motif of tracking shots following Rourke around like a third-person vidya that gives it a bit of a visual signature. It's a rough, gnarly little gem that's sometimes hard to watch, but I return to it at times and it holds up. Had I ever had a heyday of my own, he'd be a literally me up there with Vincent Gallo and Tom Noonan in Manhunter. Watch The Wrestler.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Kontroll!

Article theme: Downbound Train - Chuck Berry

Me at the end of a workday too.

In your heart of hearts, you still like Clerks. and Fight Club, but you're afraid r/criterion tryhards will bully you for "entry level" "film bro" taste. Sack up! But, in the meantime, you'll be pleased to know there's a better version of both: 2004's Hungarian sleeper kino Kontroll, set entirely in the underworld of a sprawling Budapest metro system so bleakly rendered that the film had to be prefaced by a piece-to-camera telling you it's not nearly so bad in real IRL.

The briefing room alone is impressively depressing (dimpressing).

Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) is our existentially weary protagonist working the thankless job of ticket inspector and sleeping overnight on the station platforms, resigned to a purgatorial existence of his own choosing. Commuters routinely try to swerve their fares and get belligerent when haplessly entreated to comply. The inspectors are threatened with knives, sprayed in the face with foam and violently beaten by football hooligans. They drink on shift, play games of chicken with the trains, and there are suspiciously high rates of suicide among the passengers.

Yeah...I could tell you some stories...

But while this sounds about as fun as a chronic illness, Kontroll is at least half a comedy. Much of this sturm und/or drang is as perversely funny as After Hours, and what isn't is impactful in surprising other ways. There's compassion and cameraderie among the bickering inspectors, between Bulcsú and the kindly old train driver Béla (Lajos Kovács), and there's even a place for beauty and inspiration amid the grungy tunnels, in the form of archetypal dream waifu Zsófi (Eszter Balla):

And her bear behind.

Yet these contrasts only serve to heighten the powerfully oppressive atmospherics of the subterranean scenario. At its bleary, acrid core, Kontroll is suffused with the same dense fog of dualism and Jungian nightmare imagery as the darkest of Lynch and Bergman.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Secret South!

There's something about that old-timey typewriter font.

16 Horsepower came on the scene in 1996, when Nick Cave's Let Love In and Murder Ballads had been all the rage in goth-folk-alt-country-roots-blues-whatever-rock, with Sackcloth and Ashes, an album of backwoods revival tent snake handling old tyme religion so bleak, vaguely ominous and mordant the insistently jaded yet clueless 90soids must certainly have taken it for sneering pastiche, a bit of aren't-those-dueling-banjos-rubes-creepy-and-weird condescension. But by the time they rolled out Secret South something became clear to even the densest George Carlin fanboy: David Eugene Edwards and his posse of preachers weren't joking; they meant every word of their musical ministry.

"But Pat", you splutter, spit-soaked dorito fragments spraying all over your mustard-stained "Better a wolf of Odin than a lamb of God" T-shirt, its structural integrity strained to the maximum over your sparsely hairy, heaving moobs, "Christian music suuucks!" A refrain long overdue a righteous repudiation: Christian *lyrics* suck. Finding a Christian band whose verbal cogitations stretch beyond sounding horny for the Lord can be a penance in itself, but your humble blôggeur is equal to the challenge. Lordian Guard is downright stately epic metal, Batzz in the Belfry is atmospheric ethereal wave, and even the tiresomely over-maligned Stryper eventually dropped an album of straight bangers sans the crush-on-Christ cringe. But 16 Horsepower remains the highest water mark for divinely inspired, transportive musikino on the theme of almighty God.

You might have heard their rendition of well-worn standard "Wayfaring Stranger", which dips audaciously into dark ambient, but don't expect the whole album to plow the same deep furrow: "Clogger" leads the pack with a hard rock stomp, "Praying Arm Lane" awes with the inevitability of judgement, "Splinters" sounds like the eye of an almighty storm, and Bob Dylan cover "Nobody 'Cept You" exults with an energy straight from beyond the veil. Banjos, organs, squeezeboxes and more find their way in and out of the mix but there's not a hint of gimmickry left over from the first two, more theatrical, albums. Clear a space in your top ten, and get it now.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Punisher!

Article theme: just listen to the soundtrack, man.

When the Berenstein timeline forked off from our own, its Marvel chose to eschew le ironic quips and be 500% unironic chudkino, releasing nothing but sequels to 2004's The Punisher. This sole gem in the capeshit coalheap commits whole-assedly to its edgy remit. Thomas Jane's Frank Castle cracks scarcely an expression the whole runtime, pulling off the kind of cool of which we mortals only dream when we don our Columbine cosplays.

Me staring down the Asda security guard, knowing full well I turned down a receipt for my two dozen Cadbury's Creme Eggs at the till.

You know the story: Frank is an FBI agent in the movies where the FBI takes on dangerous mobsters instead of railroading old grannies who amble through the Capitol, so he incurs the wrath of mob boss John Travolta (Broken Arrow) and his wife Laura Harring (Mulholland Dr.), who orders Frank's whole family whacked as revenge for their late son. Frank alone survives to edgily take down the Travolta crime family in reverse-revenge or, as he puts it, punishment.

Much as I love you all, if this all-time Would Hall-of-Famer asked me to have your family whacked, I doubt I'd even feel bad about it.

Not content just to kill all the mobsters (though he does that too), Frank engineers an hilariously convoluted plot straight out of Orson Welles' blackface comedy Othello to convince Travolta that Harring is cucking him with his Village-Peoplely mustachioed consigliere, just to be a dick. I don't know if the scenes in which he goes as far as planting fire hydrants in front of her car to get her ticketed were meant to be Looney-Tunes-logic hysterical, but that's sure how they played to me. I wouldn't altogether write the humour off as inadvertent though; scenes featuring what I assume are bad guys from the comics (never read a damn one) lean more blatantly into cartoon mode:

Imagine being Thomas Jane and putting more work into acquiring the perfect ripped male body than I've put into everything in my life combined (no homo), then this fucking beast shows up on set.

An underrated moment has Frank contemplate the sorry state of his fridge contents as the big dude slams his head in it.

The finely-balanced humour aside, it's mostly quite a low-key, elegaic story of a man with nothing left to live for, who becomes a symbol of elusive justice; a ghost of sorts, like Eastwood's Preacher in Pale Rider. Bereaved and bereft, Frank sits alone in his room in the dark, drinking himself to death, no reason to get up tomorrow but to punish the guilty. The Morricone pastiche theme music is sadder, wearier, not gormlessly triumphant like the interchangeable themes of every latterday Marvel hero. The spaghetti western has become mythologised by those who've never seen one; in reality, most are sub-Mad Max ripoff in their quality and care, but The Punisher ekes out the poetry found in the best fistful of examples (OK, really it's all Morricone's contributions that redeem the genre, but we'll be nice).

Sorry babe, I'm stone cold incel. I don't even make eye contact with a woman (too autistic). See ya around...kid...

It's not hard to see why they never followed this up in our Berenstain timeline: the R rating put a hard cap on the potential for profit, half the prospective audience would have found the idea of a vigilante who actually kills people too heckin icky, and at some point you'd have had to break with the all-white cast of criminals for Frank to kill, which would have had the Death Wish moral-panickers squealing histrionically all over the web even back then. I give this one a pass from the safe-edgy stamp of shame only on the assumption that it's pretty much a comics-accurate origin story. Regardless, though, one well-judged, excellently-scored western-tinged chudcore classic easily outclasses every smarmy Em Cee Uuuniverse entry and offers just a hint of what might once have been, and what could be again in better times.

Sic semper soyjaks.